By Ismail Ismail on 11 February 2010
Webcredible is recruiting! We’re looking for a head of user experience to join us on a permanent basis in London, UK.
This is an important leadership role for us and we’d like to find someone with real passion for user experience and a strong track record of innovative user-centred design thinking.
Have a read of the full job description for more information and if this sounds like your kind of job please send me your CV with covering email.
Thanks and best wishes!
By Ismail Ismail on 26 January 2010
I’m sure you’ll agree that good quality content, written for the web, is the cornerstone of a good online user experience. We’ve been delivering web writing training courses for years - in fact it’s been one of our most popular courses. Many times we’ve been asked to go one step further and develop an advanced course for more experienced practitioners.
As a result we’ve decided to launch an all-new advanced web writing course to help delegates further develop their skills. The course will be run here at our offices in partnership with digital copywriting agency, Sticky Content and it’ll begin at the end of March.
This one-day course will give you an in-depth view of how to commission and develop the right content for your site, users and business objectives. It’ll teach you how to develop content using the techniques of editorial professionals to work in brand tone of voice and to help sell online.
Anyway, just thought I’d let you know about this new course. If you’re interested check out our Internet marketing training pages to find out more about advanced web writing and all our training courses.
By Ismail Ismail on 22 October 2009
For the past couple of days a few of us have been over at Earls Court manning the Webcredible stand at Ecommerce Expo. Trenton ran a presentation on improving online conversions and we got plenty of interesting people to the stand. So, all-in-all it was pretty successful, you can check-out some photos from the show on our Flickr photostream.
To coincide with the show, on Tuesday we also launched our 4th annual Ecommerce Usability report, looking at the usability of 20 of the top UK high street retailers. Marks & Spencer’s new website (launched last week) shot to the top of the rankings alongside last year’s winner WHSmith with 83 per cent. John Lewis, Woolworths and Boots also boosted their scores to make up the top five, all gaining scores of 80 per cent or more.
It’s clear that many of the top retailers are now really focusing on the user experience of their websites, but there are still one or two basic usability guidelines where many are still coming up short. However, with the average scores increasing substantially every year (73.3 per cent this year), we may have to look into adding some more advanced usability guidelines in the future, as ecommerce sites look to continue developing their user experiences.
By Ismail Ismail on 9 October 2009
A few of us Webcredible-types headed over to the groovy offices of Yahoo! in London yesterday to participate in the IMRG mobile workshop. 
Abid Warsi, a senior consultant at Webcredible and mobile expert, was speaking about mobile user experience and usability best practice. In addition to our slot, there were excellent speakers from Akamai, ComScore, IBM, Yahoo!, Elastic Path & NEOVIA Financial/Handy Group.
It was a very interesting morning session with a great deal of lively debate on some very pertinent issues. I was particularly interested in a discussion of how mobile fits into the broader multi-channel experience of consumers.
Like many, I’ve always felt that mobile (or any other single channel) shouldn’t be treated in isolation when developing the communications and engagement around your commercial proposition. In my experience, if you do, you invariably allow technologically-led factors to drive the consumer user experience. This is not to say that you shouldn’t form a mobile strategy or take advantage of innovative enabling technologies to optimise your proposition. However, I think it’s best to ground your mobile strategy within your consumers’ overall journey and an understanding of their context of use.
In reality mobile is good for some things and poor for others. Carrying out research to learn about your audience’s behaviour, goals and needs will help determine at which point to use mobile activation (whether it’s an iPhone app, optimised mobile website, SMS messaging or whatever) or perhaps a completely different channel during the overall journey to hit the right spot.
By taking this broad view of your service proposition you can be confident that you’re using the most appropriate tool for the job at the right step in the journey depending on whether your consumers are at home, on the move, abroad or literally just around the corner from the flagship bricks and mortar store.
There’s no doubt about it. With the number of UK Smartphone users set to increase exponentially over the next few years and the planned explosion of broadband connectivity (as part of the Digital Britain agenda) the importance of digital is not to be underestimated. Clearly. But, as I discussed in a previous article on service design, you need to make sure you join up your mobile, online and offline thinking to come up with a coherent story and high-quality service for happy shoppers.
By Ismail Ismail on 10 September 2009
Jon and I attended the IMRG workshop on interactive marketing yesterday. We really enjoyed the session and like all IMRG events we met some great new people there, as well as old friends.
One particularly interesting topic of discussion was on the use of digital video as part of the online retail experience. There were good points made by a number of delegates about how video can support brand building and marketing efforts as part of an interactive campaign. I’ve previously blogged about video content on YouTube so I won’t make that point here.
Video content production can be an expensive business so if you’re seriously considering putting video into your retail journey you need to be sure it’s going to give you the return you need.
So, under what circumstances is it optimal to support your customers with video?
In my opinion the best way to work out where in the journey your videos should sit is by examining your customers’ decision-making and discovery process across multiple channels. Videos could be used to provide rich insights at the point when people are scouting around looking at competitior products, trying to understand what features and capabilities they’d like in their new purchase. The kind of product videos that add a great deal of value are the ones that really use the medium to full effect.
For example, videos of expensive, technical products could support customers to answer some preliminary questions about the tactile qualities or usability of a product such as a mobile handset or a digital camera. Apple successfully (and some might say controversially) used product videos of their iPhone across multiple channels to educate would be customers about the user experience of their product. So, there’s a good chance that customers will be visiting your bricks and mortar store to get a feel for the product for themselves and seek some expert advice from your staff. But if you’re a pureplay digital e-tailer then this might not be possible.
So, given the cost involved in producing high quality videos how would you decide which products are worth investing in?
